Profile of the Tiny Yet Exciting Isle of Man in the Times of London

One of the things I love about the British Isles are all the little corners that surprise you when you hear about them. One of them is the Isle of Man – a British Crown Dependency in the Irish Sea that is not part of the UK and has it’s own distinct national character.

The Times of London recently profiled the island and it’s recent successes. Here’s an excerpt:

On a summer’s day 40 years ago, ferries from Liverpool and Llandudno, Heysham and Fleetwood, Belfast and Dublin, would have been queuing to dock in the harbour at Douglas. The town’s long, sandy beach would have been full with holidaymakers. A big British band such as The Rolling Stones or The Who might well have been playing at the Palace Lido. But that was before cheap package holidays killed the Isle of Man’s tourist industry, once mainstay of its economy.

Today the beach is empty except for the odd dog walker. There is not a bucket and spade around. The Lido has been demolished. Breakfast in one of the seafront’s tatty Victorian hotels offers a sample of life in an old people’s home. Horsedrawn trams still trundle along the promenade but they are relics of another era, like the island’s £1 notes. “You’ve got to change to survive but it’s a damn shame about the tourists,” says Paul Desmond, who runs the last, traditional, Manx kipper curing yard.

The Isle of Man, 220 square miles of hill and glen with 82,000 inhabitants, has reinvented itself. Its business now is business, not tourists or kippers. A self-governing island, which belongs to neither the United Kingdom nor the European Union, it responded to the collapse of tourism by slashing taxes and developing a financial sector.

Read the rest of this fascinating article here.